When you operate a search engine that is queried nearly a billion times a day by hundreds of millions of users around the world, there are certain things you can’t do. For example, you can’t just make the kinds of wholesale changes and experiments that gave you the technological edge to make you the leading search engine in the first place. So what’s a market leader to do?
Well, when your name is Google, you answer this quandary by building a whole new search engine. Meet SearchMash (http://www.searchmash.com), a web site owned by Google but too shy to say so unless you check out its privacy policy. While the interface on the home page is every bit as clean as Google's, there's nary a Google logo in sight:
A good-sized white box is surrounded by a periwinkle-colored backdrop, and contains links labeled Features, About, Privacy, and Terms of Service. The copyright is dated 2006; it mentions SearchMash and only SearchMash.
The obvious question for most Google mavens, before we even start performing searches and clicking links, is why is SearchMash a freestanding website and not in Google Labs? Danny Sullivan asks Google exactly that. He was told that "one of the important factors we wanted to address was the influence that may come from Google branding. Creating a separate site will help us gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces."
Translation: too many people automatically think that anything coming from Google is cool and relevant. We want to get away from that. It may sound a little arrogant, but there are actual studies that back this up. In late April, Barry Schwartz reported on some interesting findings discussed at the SES Toronto's Searcher Behavior Research Update panel. Gord Hotchkiss, one of the panelists, said that one of his eye tracking studies revealed that Google users were much less likely to look past the second or third result returned than those who used MSN or Yahoo. Lance Jones, another speaker on the panel, reported that one of his studies showed that users rated search results they knew came from Google as more relevant - even when the two sets of results they rated were identical.
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